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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Good Question

If you are a member of the Liberal Party, and you support the first-past-the-post electoral method, do you maintain that Michael Ignatieff is the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada or do you have to concede there is a better way to elect somebody?

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

No system of election is universally appropriate. I support FPTP for a federal election but think its absurd for a leadership convention. Why? In a leadership race the end goal is to have unity. If Iggy had won with 30% of the vote, the party would be torn going into the next election campaign. This would not be good for the party. In a federal election there's no need for a riding to unite. All you want to know is who the most popular candidate is.

The delegate election process was flawed and undemocratic (which would not have happened with a one member, one vote system).

For example: in my riding, if there had been a direct vote system, Kennedy would have gone away with all 14 delegates for the riding, or at least 12.

Due to the moronic demographic formulas applied (senior, female, youth), the will as expressed by party members was completely manipulated and distorted. For example, I got three times as many votes as one woman who ran as a delegate for Ignatieff (I was running for Kennedy). I didn't get to go, but she did! But that was not what the voting members wanted.

Again, under a OMOV system, these things would not happen.

I'll go even further: under such a direct system, without any of the stupidities (e.g., demographic formulas), Kennedy would have been in second, perhaps, even first place from the start.

The reason why turnout was so low was also the fact that grassroots members simply didn't care for the idiotic delegated system (if people can't be bothered to vote in the affairs of their own party, then we have a really big democratic deficit on our hands).

Compare this with the turnout and numbers for the Alberta Tory vote (OMOV system): approx. 150,000 Albertans turned out to vote their next premier.

As Rick Mercer also pointed out, the Alberta vote was more democratic than what happened in Montréal. The Liberal Party, i.e., the party's establishment and executive, should be ashamed.

Anyone who rejoices in the fact that there will not be a OMOV system should have their head examined, because this has caused a lot of anger among the grassroots, and with the grassroots, the party won't succeed.

That woman who ran for Iggy, she would have been an ex-officio delegate anyways. So what was she doing on the ballot for non-ex-officio delegates?

The whole process is flawed, corrupt and undemocratic. The Liberal Party should learn from the Alberta Tories (and having to tell them that, that means something!).

Then, there were all those backroom deals and other conspiracies.

Plus: Rae disqualified 17 Kennedy delegates from Alberta just before the last ballot that Kennedy was still on (after which he gave up and went with Dion). This fact was hushed up by the party and there was nothing in the media either. Something fishy went on there, but the grassroots are kept in the dark as usual.